Work To Live, or Live To Work?

While man was sentenced to labor and toil for his bread, he was also commanded a day of rest from that work.

A few years ago, I attended a conference centered on principled business practices, held at a reputable Catholic university. During one seminar, the topic of managing employees in younger generations arose. In the Q&A portion, I raised the question of work-life balance. I offered examples of recent news stories about Wall Street employees who died after working extreme hours, as well as a personal anecdote about a friend at an elite law firm who was forced daily to leave his young family to labor at the office late into the night.

Afterward, an older gentleman in the audience countered that such people are “paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to work like that” and that “they chose to work for those firms.” His words struck me, and they have stayed with me even to this day.

I was recently reminded of the exchange when I came across an article about a Fortune 500 CEO who dismissed the concerns of Millennial and Gen Z workers about work-life balance with a similar argument. This successful executive asserted that you’re supposed to love what you do so much that you’re willing to work seven days a week in order to achieve success. He gave an example of how even when he is spending time with his son, he is still thinking about work—and he sees no issue at all with that.

In other words, these arguments go beyond the typical “the younger generations are lazy” and “back in my day” rhetoric to offer a positive argument: that you should love your job and want success so much that you’re willing to devote nearly all your time to it. For many Americans who are imbued with a materialist worldview, this argument might be difficult to refute.

As Catholics, however, we must recognize that the heart of this issue is not how hard we should work or how badly we should want it; rather, the heart of the issue is what we should love and what that truth demands from us. We know that at the heart of sin is disordered love and that we have an obligation to love rightly.

It is good to love our work. It is even good to want to be successful. Yet, these loves must be put in the proper order. The reality we face is that we live in a secular culture that often places professional achievement above the claims of community, family, and God. I sympathize with the Catholic family man who works at one of these demanding jobs and is faced with the difficult decision of what to sacrifice. Ideally, he should not have to face that choice at all, which is why this debate over work-life balance is of genuine importance for our society and could perhaps lead to some positive reforms.

The work-life balance debate is actually an opportunity for Catholics to have a decisive impact. It is an area where the Church has historically played a very important role. Even during medieval times—an era that many associate with brutal working conditions—the Church was able to intercede on behalf of laborers and ensure that they had time to enjoy rest, participate in recreation, and offer due worship to God. The traditional liturgical calendar’s abundance of holy days (holidays) and cultural emphasis on frequent personal and communal worship reduced the burden of work significantly in ways that compare favorably to contemporary labor demands.

Ironically, one of the arguments made by the English Protestant reformers was that the significant number of holidays honoring saints in the Catholic liturgical calendar hindered industry and encouraged idleness. After the Industrial Revolution reduced many English laborers to grueling seven-day work weeks, it was activism based on Christian arguments of the need to “keep holy the Sabbath” that helped lead to greater legislative protection for workers.

Catholics still have a role to play in fighting this tendency of modern societies to want to maximize productivity—even for those who cannot be considered “poor” in the material sense. Those bankers and lawyers should be given the same freedom as anyone else to rightly order their loves and responsibilities.

If I could go back in time to that Catholic business conference, I would say to the older gentleman: “Yes, Wall Street bankers and lawyers do get paid a lot to work like that, but that is not how it should be. If they need to be paid less to work less, then so be it. Work is good, but we should not live for it at the cost of the time and attention we owe to our families and God.”

To be clear, this issue is certainly not limited to banking and legal professions or to people who are given hefty paychecks. I personally know many others who are not paid over six figures but are still stuck in similar situations of having to constantly work overtime or to always be available to answer their boss’ or client’s call.

But I believe there is real reason for hope. Having witnessed the impact of high-achiever work culture on their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, the younger generations in this country are genuinely open to the arguments in favor of a better work-life balance, as well as the core truths underlying them that the Church has championed for centuries. Success in the work-life balance debate will ultimately help weaken the overall hold materialist ideology has on our society and will assist in bringing more souls to Christ.

We ultimately must put God first in our lives—both inside and outside of the workplace. That is the solution that our society really needs. I pray that business leaders, especially Catholic ones, will have the courage and humility to embrace that solution.

Source: https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/work-to-live-or-live-to-work